You need to know where you are striking the ball on the face of the club!

A simple way to learn where you are striking the ball on the clubface is to go to your local retail golf store and purchase some ‘impact tape’. It’s a little adhesive piece of paper that adheres to the face of your club. When you strike the ball with the impact tape attached to the clubface it will leave an imprint of the ball on the paper much like old carbon paper used to do. You can determine precisely where you are striking the ball on the clubhead! It’s neat!

In the old days, when I was a boy, we used to use baby powder for this purpose. My dad and I would simply sprinkle a little baby power on the face of the club or on the ball. When you hit the ball the powder would leave a pattern where the dimples of the ball contacted the clubface. The impact tape is much easier to use!

I often have students who will hit a ball that will shoot off wildly to the right (for right handed golfers). These students almost always assume they clipped the ball with only the very tip end of the toe of the clubhead. Sometimes they do hit the ball towards the toe of the clubface. However quite often they hit the ball on the hosel or the shank. The shank is the rounded part of the club on the heel of the clubhead where the shaft and the clubhead are attached. If the ball hits on this rounded part of the club…the ball will glance off the shank…hit the face at a sharp angle and then shoot off at a crazy angle to the right.

Sometimes I have students who think that they hit the ball with a 40 degree open clubface when the ball goes way right!!! Of course they didn’t hit the ball with an open clubface! They simply hit the ball on the heel of the clubface and the ball made contact with the rounded shank/hosel of the clubhead!

For many golfers impact tape is the only way for them to determine where they are hitting the ball on the clubface!

After you have used this method of determining where you are hitting the ball on the clubface you will learn by ‘feel’ where you are hitting the ball. This is an especially good thing to do with your driver. The driver face has a very large surface area.

You can lose 20% of your distance off the driver by missing the center! Recently I used impact tape myself with my driver and discovered I wasn’t teeing the ball high enough! I was unnecessairly losing distance!